Small Business Management: Surveys!

Technology has provided many ways that small businesses can engage directly with their audiences and there’s a lot of buzz around the way that “new media” can help you engage with your audiences (some of it coming from us!). In addition to new ways to engage with customers, technology has also improved the way that we do more traditional engagement.

I speak of course, about surveys.

Surveying your customers, when done correctly, can provide you with a wealth of useful data for your business. And with new innovations in technology, gathering the data and developing reports has never been easier. Surveying let’s you enage directly with your customers so that you can get feedback about your product, what your customers want more (or less) of and where you should be directing your energy and resources.

At WorkingPoint we use a lot of amazing technology to connect with our customers and we wanted to share some of our recommendations with you!

These interviews with local market survey guru, Sean Ellis are an excellent jumping off point to help you understand why to survey and how to do it effectively:

To conduct our surveys we used Survey Monkey to create the surveys, which we then sent out using Vertical Response which we use for all our bulk mailing. I’m particularly fond of the huge number of question types in Survey Monkey that allow you to customize the survey with a mix of multiple choice, voting, rating and fill in questions.

The reports they provide are also really easy to use and come out beautiful!

In addition to email surveys, we also closely monitor our WorkingPoint Feedback Forum which allows us to aggregate which features are most coveted by our customers, and therefore where we should be directing our development and resources!

I recently discovered Polldaddy which has a beautiful, clean look and embeds really easily in all the kinds of Social Media I use regularly (Twitter, Facebook, WordPress).